stephan happy huller wrote:The name 'Polycarp' only is added in the subscription likely by a later hand and the name appears nowhere in the main body of the letter.
To me 'the main body of the letter' means the portion after the line you just cited. My supposition is that:
1. the Syriac is more original than either Greek rescensions.
2. but the Syriac is not the original - but it probably represents the stage of the letters known to Lucian (see Lightfoot).
But you can't cite as evidence where you believe the letter starts. The first line of the text is not really so different from the greetings formula used in both biblical and secular literature (or, indeed, nonliterary papyri, except for the grandiloquence being imitated from the New Testament texts). It is the "1:1" of the letter in a critical edition and comes (I trust, given the translations) from the Syriac. It is, it must be said,
not a title and would come after any title of the work.
If I can make my own suggestion, you work too hard in this part of your argument. You posit a 3-letter corpus, a 7-letter corpus, and yet another 7-letter corpus, with both of the latter two being ascribed to Irenaeus (based on your references elsewhere). Okay, the hypothesis of two different recensions by the same author is not unparalleled (it is what some want to see behind the Western Acts). But you get no real refuge in this 3-letter Syriac corpus, which doesn't have any evidence for the omission that you envision.
Moreover, you rightly quote the conclusions of Detering about how the letters refer back and forth between each other, knowing that they would come to be read together. There is nothing from internal criticism of the 7-letter corpus that would show it to have been constructed on the back of an earlier 3-letter text, unless there is something I am missing. Also, unless I'm mistaken, the arguments about Lucian knowing Ignatius include the letters not included in the Syriac version (Polycarp, Ephesians, Romans).
We know from the epistle to the Laodiceans (the apocryphon, not Marcion's) that writers were capable of producing epitomized versions of other letters (in this case, Philippians). We also can't say for sure why only 3 letters were transmitted in Syriac, but one guess might involve the economics of making copies. Perhaps the readers were right to see how the original group of seven were a bit overdoing it and a bit repetitious, so they picked what they found most profitable. It's possible that they're the originals, of course, but it doesn't follow from their brevity and selection.
Instead of attributing both middle ("shorter") and longer recensions to Irenaeus, it seems more parsimonious to give him the longer one (if we accept the argument that he must have quoted from it) while also taking the standard line that the Syriac is abbreviated from the Greek.
Now that Ignatius may have never existed and that Irenaeus may have had a hand in rewriting the Ignatius-Polycarp cycle, it's certainly plausible. You've presented a fairly good explanation of the idea. I personally like the idea that Polycarp forged the epistles of Ignatius before his death, much like Lucian suggests, while the one who is attributed with the Martyrdom could have also designed that pathetic epistle called Polycarp to the Philippians, sagging with NT quotations, as a way to authenticate Ignatius and at the same time give Polycarp some kind of writing that could be called his own (not having left one in his own name). Polycarp in this way gets his name by assumption, because a forger doesn't presume to be called by a name just because that name is one of the recipients of the body of work he forged. (That being said, Polycarp might still have been one of several names adopted by Perigrinus.) I also like your suggestion that Polycarp would have been more or less an identity with the God-bearer and Christ-bearer 'fiery one', but Irenaeus has bought him a new identity through the epistle and martyrdom so that he could be domesticated from pagan calumnies and harnessed for catholic tradition.
I also suggest you might have worked over-hard in making Polycarp into Hegesippus into Josephus. Its appeal is that of a totalizing theory, once the imagination is first excited by earlier discoveries. But, really, it's not that different from the Eusebius and Origen totalizing theories that you yourself have ridiculed for the fact. Yes, Eusebius may have planted a Testimonium, and, yes, Irenaeus may have doctored some texts, including the epistle of Polycarp his predecessor that he is the first to mention (and of Ignatius, whom Irenaeus is the first not to name). But there are many other hands, named and unnamed, that went into the grand production on display in the literary remains we possess.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
